


What Goes Around

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: (sad content; optimistic message?), Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Getting Together, Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 06:20:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29853843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: The universe moves in circles – endings, beginnings, anniversaries. Sometimes you wind up exactly where you belong.
Relationships: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Comments: 12
Kudos: 223





	What Goes Around

**Author's Note:**

> We have extended Equivalent Exchange applications until this Sunday the 7th, because the world is a mess! You can find them [here](https://equivalentexchangeanthology.tumblr.com/post/644127645060186112/due-to-the-climate-emergencies-across-the-world), and they are very easy! ♥
> 
> This was supposed to be another short fic, but it got away from me… Just not as much as the other one that got away from me, which I took a break from to try to write something that wouldn't get away from me. Failed step one. OTL
> 
> Kind of a content warning – I have seen a lot of friends online dealing with grief lately, and I was thinking about that a lot as I got deeper into this. I wish that I had answers for you. I wish that there were answers. I hope that, if nothing else, if you have lost someone or something, recently or not, this might make you feel a little less alone. ♥
> 
> It is very likely another Default Tierfal AU where Ed still has automail and alchemy, but since that wasn't important to the story, it barely comes up. Feel free to ignore it if you prefer!

Ed waves at Chris on his way in. He’d like to think that he’s made progress with her over the years, but since he only recently graduated from _“Hey, brat”_ to _“Hey, Blondie_ ”… realistically speaking, he may still have a long way to go.

She gestures with her cigarette in the direction that he should go, and he nods even though he already knows.

Roy favors a specific booth in the back even when he’s having a decent day: it’s quieter back there; and the light is nice and low; and since he hoards this one all the time, the seats get fewer drinks spilled over them on average. It’s a good place for hosting conspiratorial cabals, and also for holding birthday parties. They did Al’s here last year. He got wasted and cried about how humanity doesn’t deserve cats and then giggled all the way home. It was cute.

Roy is also cute—always, lately; and specifically now. Both are a problem.

Ed had always sort of assumed that he was attracted to Roy because of the combination of power (all the time, in every conceivable way), intellect (…most of the time), and untouchability. Roy had fit into the world very differently than Ed; his entire approach to existence seemed fascinatingly foreign. He had a set of characteristics that were familiar—things that they had in common, like the stubbornness and the temper and the drive and the scientific curiosity—but he’d transmuted those components into something drastically different from what Ed had made from them.

It had been interesting. And Roy had been… an _adult_ , and established, and very good at feigning a maddeningly deep disinterest and riling Ed up to the heights of a fervor that was mostly spitting rage, but sometimes…

Sometimes, often, increasingly, it had started to become something else.

Ed had not, of course, made it that far without being able to step outside himself—forcibly, a lot of the time—and examine his own emotions through the most logical possible lens. He’d known a damn crush when he’d seen one.

He’d just always assumed that it would eventually… go away. Peter out; fade to black; dwindle; die. Isn’t that what crushes are supposed to do? You’re supposed to look back fondly for a while and then forget.

They’re not supposed to live. They’re certainly not supposed to persist, and resist, and… grow. Deepen. Thicken. They’re not supposed to warm up and settle down and make themselves at home.

They’re not supposed to crush _you_ , very slowly, over time.

Absence had made his idiot heart grow fonder, when he and Al had taken off and traveled for a while. He’d caught himself wondering how Mustang was doing, and what he was doing, and… who. He’d reminded himself—firmly, loudly, furiously—that it was none of his damn business, and that he didn’t even _care_ , but he he’d never quite managed to shake it.

He’d dreamed about the bastard an awful lot. He couldn’t be held accountable for that.

Time never healed the wound, either, which has left him one for two with lousy platitudes. Why can’t any useful adages ever come true? He wouldn’t turn down some health and wealth in return for getting up semi-regularly at a semi-reasonable hour these days, for whatever that’s worth. He would even settle for having a bird in the hand. Birds are nice. They’re nicer than people, at any rate.

They’re nicer than _Mustang_ , actually, but Ed just never…

It had just trailed him, like a cobweb clinging to his shoulder-blades, to the furthest reaches of the continent.

And then it had reeled him back in.

He and Al had been innocently exploring new places in the city that had cropped up while they’d been away; Al had started marking up a map of Central because he wanted to try every single restaurant once. He had pointedly ignored Ed’s questions about whether they were going to have to return to restaurants that they knew were bad in order to check them off in the name of scientific inquiry, and then they’d stepped into a new pub. The painted wooden sign over the door hadn’t weathered much yet; it had a checkerboard background with a chess piece on it—a white knight.

Ed had known, in a rational sort of way, that he was eventually going to run into Mustang. He’d known that Mustang was keeping tabs on them, for one thing; he’d known that there were birthdays coming up, for another. He’d known that their paths would cross.

He hadn’t expected them to collide—quite literally—in the middle of a bar on a Saturday night in the midst of Al’s relentless quest for waffle fries.

Mustang somehow caught an arm around Ed’s back to stop him from tipping over onto the floor, and still managed to balance a tray of empty glasses in the other hand. Stranger yet, Mustang looked so genuinely pleased to see him that Ed’s breath performed a spectacular disappearing act, beguiling audiences of all ages. Ed wondered if someone might spot it hightailing its way towards the Cretan border.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Mustang said, because of course he fucking did.

His hand swept up Ed’s back and brushed over his shoulder before retreating, and the force of the shiver that Ed suppressed could have split stone.

“Sit down anywhere,” Mustang said. He only took a half-step back—it was crowded, sure; that was why Ed had crashed right the hell into him in the first place, but it wasn’t… _that_ crowded. “What’s your poison?”

“It’s all poison,” Ed croaked out. “I don’t care.”

Al _laughed_ , the little demon. Ed made detailed plans to disown him as they dodged around people and eventually rousted up a little booth table near the back. There was a slightly sticky menu lying on it, which Al snatched up before Ed could lecture him about how disease-ridden it probably was.

“Waffle fries!” Al said. He pointed, which as well as confirmed Ed’s growing suspicion that Al had _known_ that this would happen, and had specifically set out to torture him. “Finally. Isn’t that exciting?”

Ed sensed as much as he saw the shadow, the presence, the entity. A little of it was probably qi training, sure, but most of it… 

Most of it was just Roy.

“Jeez,” Ed said, looking up out of the corner of his eye as much as possible, since that felt marginally safer. “Good thing I got out of the military when I did. Budget cuts must be brutal.”

Mustang grinned. In plainclothes, in the warm yellow light, with an expression that _wasn’t_ a smirk—

“It’s Rebecca’s birthday,” he said. “Jean owes me a hundred-thousand unspecified favors for this. I got that in writing. Tonight is going to be _very_ worth it. What can I get for you?”

Al got waffle fries. Ed got his comeuppance, and also a decent hamburger.

Al renewed the quest for waffle fries again the following weekend, and insisted that the ones at Madame Christmas’s new place were vastly superior to any of the others that they’d tried so far—which was arguable at _best_. Ed went along with it because Al deserved all and any waffle fries that he wanted, when he wanted them, regardless of relative quality. It had nothing to do with hoping that Roy would be hanging around the place again; and _less_ than nothing to do with hoping that Roy might be working less and chatting with them more.

For the first time in just about the whole written history of the universe, one of Ed’s wishes came true.

The universe made sure that he remembered why he didn’t wish for things too often: within a matter of weeks, he had no choice but to acknowledge that the crush wasn’t anything like a crush anymore.

It was an _avalanche_.

He held out some hope that maybe it would ease off, that maybe the wind or the rain would erode some of the rubble away. But it’s been over a year, now, and he’s still buried under too much rock to see the sunlight.

It’s quiet down here, though. And it’s… well, it’s not _nice_ , exactly, but there’s something peaceful about being trapped. There’s a sort of acceptance to it—something different from helplessness. He can’t do anything; he can’t push a single pebble without risking something _worse_ , but… it’s all right. It is.

Being friends with someone like Roy is a hell of a lot better than being nothing. Ed knows a lot about nothing—for starters, it’s always the safest expectation if you don’t want to get your ass kicked and your heart handed to you diced up fine.

He does wish, sometimes, that Roy would just… date someone. Anyone. If there was someone else—someone specific—Ed could respect that. Loyalty makes Ed’s world turn, and he just wants the stupid bastard to be happy. If Roy loved somebody else, then maybe Ed could let him go.

Roy doesn’t, though. Or at least he doesn’t talk about it, and they talk a _lot_. Dinner and drinks on weekends and coffee and lunches during the week sometimes; every now and again, Roy calls him just to rant about the brass, or to ask Ed to rant about alchemy to give him something else to think about. Al always rolls his eyes, but he never, ever tries to stop them. Ed can’t tell if that’s a sign that Al thinks it’s a good thing, and doesn’t want to interrupt; or if it means that Al feels sorry for Ed, getting wound up and taken in like this over and over, letting it matter to him more than it matters to Roy. Ed hasn’t asked which one it is, because he doesn’t really want to know. It’s fine like this. It is. It’s fine.

The fact is that Ed loves being friends with Roy, which probably proves all of the longstanding theories about him being some special kind of masochist. This one’s not his fault, though, whatever certain smartass mechanics who claim to be his friend like to say—Roy’s really different without all of the other nonsense in the way. He’s weirdly funny when he’s not trying to impress anyone; and he’s weirdly nice when he doesn’t have anything to prove; and he’s weirdly _weird_ when he’s left to his own devices. He likes obscure alchemy trivia and oversalted fries and telling obviously fake stories to people with a straight face to test how long he can continue before they call him on his bullshit. He hides all of it from most people on purpose, because the real Roy is dangerously vulnerable underneath the endless projections. Getting to know him is a gift. He’s trusted Ed with that. That’s enough.

Roy is, of course, settled down at the usual table, bathed in the usual warm yellow light. His shoulders tighten just slightly as Ed’s footsteps move into earshot, but he doesn’t look up and smile until a few seconds later.

“You’re early,” he says.

Ed shrugs, which is made more difficult—or at least more prickly—by the bouquet of white roses that he’s holding over his shoulder. He normally has a tendency to play pretty fast and loose with their meeting times; Roy doesn’t seem to resent him for getting caught up in books or distracted by new street vendors or generally losing track of time.

Today’s important, though. Ed left well in advance on purpose, to make sure that he’d have time to try more than one flower shop if he didn’t like the offerings at the first.

But he doesn’t want to make a thing of it, so he just says, “Am I? Huh,” and then “Are you ready to go?”

Roy draws a deep breath, lets it out, and forces another little smile. He spreads both hands on the tabletop for leverage before he stands. On another day, Ed would make the requisite _Gee, getting old?_ joke and enjoy the sparks.

Today, though, is the seventh anniversary of the day that Maes Hughes bled out in a phone booth. Ed knows damn well that Roy would give _anything_ for Hughes to have the chance to hold a hand to his back and grimace, or to whine at length about needing a stronger prescription for his glasses, or to threaten all of Elysia’s male classmates with bodily harm.

Maybe not just the male ones—maybe all of them. Ed learned relatively recently that Hughes was… open-minded… about that sort of thing.

That’s still fucking him up a little, if he’s being perfectly honest, but he’s trying not to think about it too much. Roy doesn’t owe him anything. Roy hasn’t made him any promises; Roy hasn’t offered him anything but friendship, maybe fondness. It doesn’t matter if Roy slept with his previous best friend; that doesn’t mean that it’s ever going to be on the table. Hell, maybe Roy’s already sleeping with Riza, or Havoc, or Havoc _and_ Rebecca. Roy and Ed are just friends until Roy indicates otherwise, and that’s… fine. That’s good enough.

All things considered, it’s pretty fantastic for Ed to have something in his life that nearly passes for normal, like a friend that he’s not sleeping with. So that’s good.

Roy’s up. There aren’t any empty glasses on the table, and since Ed was early, it’s unlikely that Roy had time to clear any in advance. That’s progress over last year.

They wave at Chris again on their way out. Roy likes to get flowers on the way—he seems to think that there’s something spontaneous about it, which is grossly illogical, because he only ever buys white lilies anyway, but Ed’s not going to get on his case about the weird traditions that he uses to hold himself together when he visits the grave of his dead best friend.

Last year, Roy had seemed a little hesitant about inviting him along on this particular pilgrimage for the first time. Ed had pieced that one together after the fact: it made sense for people to assume that he would react less in the spirit of of _How can I help you get through this?_ and more along the lines of _Why would you bring wilting plants to a corpse underground? They’re already dead. They won’t notice. It won’t matter. Dead is dead; they’re decomposing by now_.

He still brings flowers to Mom’s grave, though, when he goes out East. He’s understood for a long time—not from the _beginning_ , of course; he wishes it was from the beginning—that the flowers and the rites and the rituals are for the living. They’re to try to build a scaffold to hang the grieving on, to give it structure, to give it shape. They’re handholds on a nightmare that your heart will just keep trying to deny, no matter how many years you mark out in your brain. If you can try to set quantifiable acts around it, then it seems like it has a circumference sometimes—it seems like it’s finite. It seems like it _ends_.

Flowers are for the living, because sometimes you can parcel up just a little fraction of your pain among their petals, and you can leave that little fraction on the ground. Flowers are much easier to get your hands around than the prospect of _forever_ , and of _never again_.

Roy is quiet as they walk. The second flower vendor that they come across has acceptable white lilies on display; money changes hands; Roy is unerringly polite without being remotely charming. That’s how you _know_ that something’s wrong.

The silence is far more comfortable than Ed would have expected in the not-so-good old days. Their elbows brush a couple of times. He won’t read into that, but he figures that he can still appreciate it, for all of its meaninglessness. Casual human contact is nice sometimes. Mostly. Depending on the human.

It’s nice with Roy.

He knows that Roy will talk when Roy wants to. It has never, once, in the history of Amestris, been a mystery to anyone when Roy has _wanted_ to talk. It tends to remain utterly unmysterious for the better part of an hour sometimes. They both know that Ed will be listening whenever Roy feels ready.

It’s an incongruously pretty day—sunny, with a light breeze tousling the treetops; cool enough for a long walk at a brisk pace, but the leaves haven’t turned colors yet. A last gasp of summer seeping into fall.

Ed’s positive that Al will be out on the little balcony of their apartment, breathing it in—or that, at the very least, he’ll have thrown open all the windows and sprawled out on their couch where he can watch the wispy clouds go scudding by. The air tastes clean. People chatter on the sidewalks as they move past; Roy’s shoulder grazes his. That happens often enough these days that neither of them bothers murmuring the little _Sorry_ s anymore. It has occurred to Ed to wonder if Roy ever does anything on accident.

If not, though—if he really is always in control; if it really is on purpose—

Casual human contact is nice sometimes. If Ed can give him that at a time like this, then… good. That’s good.

That’s enough.

It makes sense, in an Amestris sort of way, that the military cemetery would be within walking distance from the fringes of downtown. They don’t want people to forget about their newspaper headline heroes; they don’t want anyone to be able to ignore the so-called sacrifices, no matter how many of those were made in the name of bloodshed and barefaced lies. It’s also a little unsettling how much the cemetery reminds Ed of home—of Resembool. Grassy hills; scattered trees; pouring sunlight. The wind ripples through the grass and pulls at Roy’s coat and rattles the paper wrapped around the flowers.

Roy leads the way. He still hasn’t spoken, and his shoulders are tight, but he doesn’t look like he’s in too much agony, which is about as much as Ed was willing to hope for.

The older that Ed gets, the more it rips him up inside to look at headstones. Any of them—Mom’s, Hughes’s, the ones that they just pass by. Every single one of them encapsulates somebody’s hell. Every single one is a memento of a human being who breathed and loved and mattered, that somebody had to _lose_.

People die young every day. It’s always a tragedy for someone. It’s always the end of so many beautiful little things that you always took for granted, and then the planet keeps on turning, because the world doesn’t care. It should, though. Something ought to change, so that you know. So that you see it. So that it wouldn’t just be invisible to everybody else.

Roy lets out a deep breath and settles down on the grass. It’s grown in far too thick to see the edges of the grave anymore. The stone is weathering. Roy lays the lilies down directly in front of the headstone and sits back, curling his arms around his knees.

Ed puts the roses down near the lilies and sits down next to Roy.

He watches the wind slither through the grass, which is much safer than watching it whisper through Roy’s hair and wondering what it would feel like to put his fingers in its place. That part of himself can wait. It likes to permeate all of his other thoughts with little wistful _what-if_ questions, but he can make it wait.

Gracia told him once that she and Elysia come on Hughes’s birthday instead of today, and that every year they bring a tea party like a picnic and update him about everything that’s been going on. She told Ed that she comes alone on their wedding anniversary and updates him on a lot of other things, too. She said that she knows that Hughes would have wanted her to give in to the gentle pressure from her parents and her friends and _find someone else_ , because he loved her too much to want her to stay married to his memory. She said that she still hears his voice when she’s on the verge of sleeping; she said that she still thinks she sees him out of the corner of her eye. She said that she doesn’t know what that means, anyway, _finding someone else_ —as if you can take a stroll down the sidewalk and pick people up and try them on and then discard them. She said that people happen; people converge; people find each other. It has to be equivalent, in its own way. The spark won’t catch if it doesn’t have anything to light.

Ed’s not sure that he ever actually knew Hughes very well. He’s not sure how well he’s ever known anyone, but he’s also not sure if that’s the point. The part of someone that belongs to you—the part that you keep carrying—can be enough. There’s no mathematical threshold of hours spent in contact, divided by disagreements; there’s no affection coefficient. People just are; and then they’re not. Grief just is. Love just is. Living is what’s left.

Ed may end up sitting here in silence in the wind for the better part of an hour, depending on how much time Roy needs today. It was warmer last year. He should’ve brought a coat, but he can never share that particular piece of intel with anyone, because Al tried to make him take one, and he insisted that he’d be fine. It’ll just have to go with him to _his_ grave.

He wonders what platitudes people told Roy and Gracia when the mound of soil was still fresh. _He lived a full life_ , probably, which is some goddamn bullshit. Hughes did well for himself—he sought out what he wanted, and he got it, and he cherished it, and he was _happy_ —but that’s not the same thing. Eighty years wouldn’t be enough time to take the world in for everything that it is and has, and everything that it isn’t. Maybe Hohenheim got close with a couple centuries to play with, but thirty years—

Ed knows better than many that no one’s owed a single damn thing by the atomic wash of the unfeeling universe, but hell if thirty years, even with a handful of them mostly blissful, doesn’t sound like a dirty fucking cheat.

People probably said _He was a good man_ , too. Ed knows that that one, at least, was true, even if it wasn’t simple.

Hughes did terrible things, and great ones, and he loved with everything that he had in him. Ed’s not in much of a position to take the measure of a man and slap some kind of moral label on the top, but it… it all has to count for something. Doesn’t it? He made the people around him happier. He made several of them better.

The shoulder-pattings and solemn voices and the flood of casseroles don’t change it, though. They don’t change a goddamn thing about the gaping wound and the million little moments every day where you’ll remember. They don’t change all the things that you wish you’d said—or that you wish that you hadn’t said.

Ed watches a couple of clouds hanging low on the horizon, because looking at Roy would probably make it seem like he was trying to get a gauge on how long they’re going to have to sit here in the increasingly chilly wind while the blades of grass bow all around them. He _is_ trying to get a gauge on that, obviously, but he doesn’t want Roy to know it. People often think that he’s dropping hints when he’s just trying to get information.

Roy’s entitled to as long as he needs. Ed’ll sit here until moonrise if he has to; it’s just that from a purely practical perspective, if it’s all otherwise the same, he’d… rather… not.

Roy draws a breath and lets it out slowly, softly—a prelude to a syllable if Ed’s ever heard one, and certainly enough of an excuse to glance over and arch an eyebrow. _Yeah, I’m still here. Yeah, I’m still listening. Take your time_.

“It’s getting harder,” Roy says, delicately at first, “to remember. I’m losing the little things—the details.” He swallows; his eyes track a sparrow flitting from one tree to the next. “It feels like it’s my fault. Like I’m… letting go.”

“You’re not,” Ed says. “And it’s not. And that’s what he would want. He wouldn’t want you living in the shadow of it.”

“No,” Roy says, very softly. “He wanted me to be happy. God knows he spent enough time trying to annoy me into it. Dying on me was a fairly dramatic change of tactics.” He makes a concerted effort to smile. “Hell of a strategist. Remarkable that he can continue to screw with me even after death.”

That’s good. Addressing it is good. Accepting it is good. Trying to keep moving is good, even if it’s never quite possible to move _on_.

“They do that,” Ed says. “I think my mom started possessing Al in small doses. He said ‘Edward _Elric_ ’ once in this voice that just—shit, I got _chills_.”

Roy smiles. He looks at Ed as he does it, for a long second, and then looks at the gravestone again. He still has his arms settled around his knees; he curls his fingers in the fabric of his slacks. “Sometimes, in that first second when I pick up the phone, I just… forget. It’s not even a hope; it’s this… instinct. An expectation. And then when I remember, it’s…”

“A brand-new freight train,” Ed says, “right in the face.”

Ed hopes that Roy’s face won’t make contact with any real trains any time soon; it’s a good one, even when it’s twisting up into a half scandalized, half reluctantly amused expression. “Well-put.”

Ed breathes in deep and breathes out slow. “It doesn’t…”

“Ever go away?” Roy says, eyes darting up to the trees again. “I know. And I think… in some ways, I think that’s… good. He was always trying to keep me honest. Having him in the back of my head, even when it hurts like hell, is… It helps me remember what he wanted for me.”

“To be happy,” Ed says.

“Whatever that means,” Roy says, with a flicker of another smile.

“And probably not to sit here until we freeze to death,” Ed says.

Roy arches an eyebrow at him, which is, as always, crueler than he seems to know. “Are you commiserating, or asking me to hurry up?”

Ed musters a smirk that Roy ought to appreciate, since it’s his fault that Ed learned how. “Why can’t it be both?”

Roy rolls his eyes, and then his shoulders, and then curls both gorgeous hands into fists and plants them in the grass before he starts to stand. The automail creaks as Ed follows suit, so it’s probably a good thing that he hasn’t made any cracks about old people’s bones today. His aren’t exactly shipshape these days either.

They get through a grand total of about five steps before Roy says, “Th—”

“Don’t even start,” Ed says.

Roy smiles in the direction of the path and the gate and the city beyond it, and then he glances over at the way that Ed has attempted—apparently unsuccessfully—to wrap his arms around himself in a subtle sort of way. “Are you cold?”

“Maybe,” Ed says. “If you don’t tell Al.”

“Secret’s safe with me,” Roy says, and then—

Oh, _hell_ , he’s shrugging off his coat and slinging it around Ed’s shoulders before Ed can run.

The thick wool is extremely heavy, and extremely warm. It smells like Roy. Ed doesn’t even know which part of that trifecta he wants the most as he pulls it in around himself tightly.

That’s a lie. He knows.

“Better?” Roy asks, airily, like he isn’t the one subjecting his defenseless nerves to the bite of the wind now.

“Yeah,” Ed mutters, partly as a reward for the fact that Roy hasn’t even let his eyes linger on how much lower the tails of the coat hit the backs of Ed’s calves than they do Roy’s.

That could be less about short-joke mercy than it is about general bemusement, though—Roy looks slightly distracted for the duration of the time that they spend making their way out of the cemetery. Ed doesn’t begrudge him that. Especially not now that Ed is _warm_ , and wreathed in the… 

Well.

“Ed,” Roy says, slowly, just as they reach the iron gate. “May I get you a drink?” 

Ed adjusts the lapels of Roy’s coat and hikes his shoulders up against the wind. “You’d better. Figure we’re going back to Chris’s place, right?”

Roy glances at him. There’s something guarded in it. That’s— “I meant… not what we… ordinarily do. ‘A drink’, as in… A _significant_ drink.”

Ed’s life flashes before his eyes. At least it’s eventful, up to a point. “Are you—Mustang.”

“Present,” Roy says.

“ _Mustang_ ,” Ed says. “‘Significant drink’? What the hell is—are you offering me absinthe, or asking me out on a date?”

Roy smiles at him, guarded still, but the heat behind it— “Why can’t it be both?”

Ed’s brain fizzes. It grasps around for words and finds nothing; for all of the thousands of books and millions of words that he’s crammed into it by way of his eyeballs over the years, he can’t collect a single sentence to respond with. He can’t think of anything except _Yes yes yes yes is he_ kidding _? Please don’t let it be a joke. He has to know. He wouldn’t fuck with me like that_.

With his brain out of commission, his mouth makes the executive decision to fill the gap with absolute insipidity, which he supposes is fair enough: “I don’t like absinthe. Makes me weird.”

“Are you sure?” Roy says. The hint of his grin makes Ed’s skin tingle; makes Ed’s heart clench; makes Ed’s joints turn into rubber and his blood to steam. “How can anybody tell the difference?”

Ed sincerely wants to meet that with a suitably cutting retort, but he’s still having trouble with the concept of language. “Spoken like a guy who can’t wait to get absinthe dumped down his shirt.”

Roy laughs. At least that response to Ed’s threats makes more sense these days; when he was a kid, he usually meant them. “I lent you my coat—my _best_ coat. Surely that invokes some sort of an exchange.”

“Sure,” Ed says. “I’ll exchange my foot for that stick that’s usually up your ass.”

Roy laughs more, which is probably a bad sign for his sense of humor. That’s definitely why Ed’s heart is trying to flip itself inside out.

“Knock it off,” Ed says, not that he’s expecting some kind of miracle. “It’s a nice coat, sure, but it’s not… absinthe-nice.”

“You know,” Roy says, lightly, but the fact that he doesn’t look over is a giveaway; “I’m not terribly fond of absinthe either. Perhaps we should just go out to dinner instead.”

Ed takes a deep breath. One last out. Just in case. “Significant dinner?”

Roy glances at him, ever so slightly cautiously again, and smiles. “Yes. Someplace decent. Waffle fries optional. What do you think?”

“I think you’ve got yourself a deal,” Ed says, and Roy looks so damn pleased that Ed thinks…

Well, Ed thinks Hughes would probably be happy for them both.


End file.
